Staying grounded.

Posted on January 23, 2016 by luckyotter

Sometimes I feel ungrounded, dissociated. Sometimes I feel like a gust of wind could blow me into nonexistence. I was raised in a harsh, chaotic, abusive environment and was blown from there into a harsh, chaotic, abusive marriage. As a result, I never was able to form strong roots. But to be grounded in life, to be able to bend and not break, adapt but not lose yourself, remain strong even when the cold winter winds blow, you need those roots.

Strong roots may not be with your family of origin, who should have nurtured you so you’d grow them. That may not be possible. But it doesn’t mean you can’t develop them.

I read a post today that inspired me because of the incredible photographs of an old Ficus Macrophylla tree, a beautiful and majestic tree with roots that could probably withstand an earthquake. I mean, just look at those roots! It’s incredible the way nature can adapt to almost any condition. There are trees that live on the cliffs of coastal California that grow vertically because of the strong winds that constantly buffet them. The trees have grown to adapt to their harsh conditions. They have grown stronger because of them.

We can also grow stronger because, not in spite of, the harsh conditions we might have been raised in. We can take inspiration from the trees by grounding ourselves and knowing how strong we really are, and that will prepare us for almost anything life can throw at us.

Take a walk. Look at some trees. Become conscious of your feet on the ground, your connection with the earth. Meditate on these things and try to stay in the present. Don’t worry about the future or the past. Turn off all the noise in your head, even for only a few minutes a day, and just be, like the tree.

Spirituality and therapy don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

Posted on January 3, 2016 by luckyotter

More often lately, I’m feeling the presence of the Holy Spirit while at church. What this feels like is an opening of my heart and a warm surge of emotion. Sometimes I even get a little misty-eyed during the proceedings, especially after taking communion. It’s hard to put the emotion into words, but it’s a sort of reverent feeling and I always come away feeling energized and ready to confront the week ahead, knowing I’m not alone and God walks beside me every step of the way, no matter how tough things might get (and my life is far from easy!)

I’ve been getting similar feelings during my therapy sessions, and I know some of this is due to repressed emotions coming to conscious awareness. A lot of the emotion, though, I have to admit, has to do with transference–which are the strong feelings some clients develop toward their therapists that can easily be mistaken for limerence or romantic attraction (but in my case lacks a sexual aspect, which is good). In actuality, you don’t know your therapist at all (or at least you shouldn’t, beyond his or her qualifications and competence). The idealization many of us experience toward our therapists are our own projections and indicate primitive attachment has been achieved, and this can become a basis of healing as you learn to work through those feelings to connect with your own emotions and eventually develop healthier relationships with other people.

So what does any of this have to do with the Holy Spirit? Why am I talking about therapy and God in the same article? Well, because the emotions I feel in therapy are often similar to the emotions I have in church. The transference I’m currently experiencing is strong, very strong. When I was 22 I developed a strong transference toward a therapist I’d been seeing for about 2 years and I couldn’t handle it; I lacked the maturity to be able to work through the almost overpowering emotions that came up and they became too painful and I eventually left. That’s okay though; I wasn’t ready.

I couldn’t resist.

I’m a lot older and more mature now, and have learned how to be mindful and not allow my emotions to overwhelm me to the point of doing stupid things or making bad choices. In fact, I’ve almost become too controlled, since my primary goal in therapy right now is to connect more with my emotions, which due to complex PTSD, BPD and avoidant PD, have become almost inaccessible to me most of the time. Church and therapy are the two places where I feel safe actually allowing them to bubble to the surface a little bit.

But I’m still only human, and if I’m not careful, my transference toward my therapist could become inappropriate and while not likely to hurt him, could be damaging to me. Maintaining healthy boundaries and remaining mindful, while still welcoming and allowing myself to experience transference feelings toward my therapist can be a bit of a challenge.

So I had a sort of epiphany while praying this morning in church. Why not invite the Holy Spirit in during my sessions? Why not say a prayer just before each session, asking God to help me get the most out of therapy and thanking him for what I’ve already accomplished? Why not ask God to help me stay mindful but still able to experience the wonderful kaleidoscope of emotion that lies under all the fear and defenses I’ve built after years of abuse? God brought this particular therapist and I together for a reason. But he’s just a human being and imperfect like everyone else. I know this on a cognitive level, if not an emotional one. If he seems “ideal” it’s only God working through him; and it’s only me projecting my need for a perfect caregiver, a surrogate parent, onto him.

I also think that asking the Holy Spirit in during my sessions will actually enhance my ability to access buried emotions, and that’s my primary goal at the moment. I think that if I do this, I can get even more out of therapy than I have been getting, and will progress at a faster rate. so I’m going to try doing this this week and see what happens.
God and therapy don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

Emotional blockages.

Posted on December 20, 2015 by luckyotter

I think my challenges in really feeling my emotions are due to blockages of energy within my body. I discovered this simply by focusing on how my body felt in my therapy sessions or when I feel an emotion bubbling to consciousness. There’s a definite tightness in three parts of my body, which actually correspond to three of the chakras. If the emotion is strong, there can be a dull pain, as if the pain of the emotion is trying to get out and can’t. I can never fully let go, because of my fear that if I do, I might completely lose control. I’m learning that ironically, I have less control by holding negative emotions inside because when I do that, they continue to act as a slow-acting poison long after their job is done, instead of passing out of me like the release they’re supposed to be and freeing my soul to be able to experience more positivity in my life and more able to access my creative spark.

I think I’ve grown to trust my therapist enough that I’ve begun to let go just a little.

There are three places where my emotions are blocked:

The middle of my abdomen. This corresponds to the third, or solar plexus, chakra, which represents competence and power. I’ve always felt so powerless and incompetent.

My chest. This corresponds to the fifth, or heart chakra. This is where the higher emotions such as agape love, empathy, all kinds of (nonsexual) connectedness, and gratitude reside. It’s always been so hard for me to really connect with others, due to fear and lack of trust.

The middle of my throat. This corresponds to the 6th, or throat, chakra, which represents the ability to communicate with others. I’ve always been a shy person afraid to speak up, even if it’s for my own rights as a human being. Blogging has helped, but it’s not nearly enough.

I think by focusing in on bodily sensations and becoming mindful of your feelings, you can zero in on which ones you need to work on and focus on relaxing and breathing deeply into the blocked areas to be able to feel it fully enough so you can purge it.

It isn’t all about me.

Posted on December 7, 2015 by luckyotter

What I’m learning is that everything isn’t always about me.

I used to always assume people were obsessing in a negative way about me and would interpret, say, a neutral expression or a lukewarm greeting as “that person must be upset with me/hate me/is mad at me/disapproves of me” etc. Sometimes I have to make a conscious effort not to let my mind go in this direction if someone acts in a way other than thrilled to see me. Sometimes they’re just having a bad day, are angry at someone else, or angry in general, or are generally just an asshole to everyone. Sometimes it’s nothing at all other than my choosing to perceive a neutral expression or body language as something negative. It takes a lot of practice to get out of that habit of paranoia and hypervigilance and I always have to remind myself to stop taking every little thing personally and think outside myself instead. I think this is a prerequisite to being able to empathize–being mindful that someone else might have a problem that has nothing to do with me.

“Beating C-PTSD in the face with a big Zen stick”

Posted on September 24, 2015 by luckyotter

A new video about mindfulness by Spartanlifecoach (Richard Grannon) and how becoming “pH neutral” can help people with complex PTSD and related disorders.

Pick your battles.

Posted on July 27, 2015 by luckyotter

One of the things we borderlines need to learn is to pick our battles. Not everything is worth fighting over or getting upset about. Sometimes it’s best to just accept someone else is not going to agree with you or do things your way, and we can agree to disagree. I’ve gotten pretty good at that. I didn’t used to be. I’d rather have harmonious relationships than always be “right.” It’s not important that I’m always right or always win.

So what if your adult daughter wants to get a lip piercing or your husband always leaves the toothpaste cap off. So what if your best friend likes a different presidential candidate than you do. You can tell your adult daughter you would prefer she doesn’t get the piercing, or remind your husband to put the cap back on, or tell your friend (nicely) you disagree with her choice in candidates, but after that let it go. Don’t keep harping on it. Do these things really matter? Are they worth the emotional investment of fighting over? Ask yourself those things before “going off” on them.

I’m not encouraging you to let people walk all over you. If someone is abusing you, you need to get away from them because they are not going to stop by you telling them to stop. There are situations where it’s worth standing up for yourself and your loved ones and fighting for your rights. If someone is violating your rights or abusing or bullying you or someone you love, then you should definitely make a stand or take appropriate action. But in most cases when people merely disagree, that’s all it is–a disagreement. Sometimes it’s best to “turn the other cheek” (after sharing your own opinion if you want to) if you want harmonious relationships and the behavior or actions you find offensive are more a matter of annoyance to you than anything truly serious. Choose your battles, unless you want your life to become a battlefield.

How to Remove a Mindworm

Posted on June 20, 2015 by luckyotter

I stumbled across this post and was like, OMG, this happens to me CONSTANTLY! Mindworms are SO annoying! How to deal…

Lessons From the End of a Marriage

Much like earworms are snippets of a song that refuses to vacate your auditory processing center, mindworms are remnants of thoughts that stubbornly replay through your brain. It’s not only annoying; it’s maladaptive. The stuttering brain becomes stuck on a particular thought and is unable to move on to the next or be receptive to new ideas.

Mindworms are tenacious little buggers. They like to hide when you focus on them too intently only to start their slithering once you allow yourself to relax. They may go quiet for hours or even days at a time, prompting a false sense of security, before making themselves heard once again.

Although not fatal, mindworms are parasites that remove some of our lifeforce. If allowed to wander for too long, they hold their host back from optimal health and wellness.

There are no quick fixes for the removal of mindworms. The development of…

View original post 475 more words

I still have so much to learn…

Posted on June 20, 2015 by luckyotter

I just spent a few minutes ordering (used) books about Borderline and Narcissistic Personality Disorders from Amazon. There’s still so much I don’t know, especially about my own BPD, which trips me up constantly, in spite of my attempts to be mindful and think before I act (or react).

For example, a few months ago I unintentionally alienated someone I valued as a friend. Actually two people were involved. What happened was I went on a rant because a second woman hurt my feelings, and rather than discuss this privately with her, or simply move on and chalk the whole thing up as a learning experience, I decided to write a rant and publish it. No, I did not identify the person in my rant and yes, what this person had said to me (in private) was extremely mean and hurtful (and definitely not true either). But could I just move on or let it go–or just tell the person how hurt I was? No, instead I had to turn this person’s private message to into an angry blog post. After I realized what I had done, I removed that post, but its repercussions still haunt me. This individual is absolutely convinced I am a malignant narcissist with evil intentions and has said so in public. I’m not, but based on my behavior at the time, I can understand why someone would think this is the case.

The woman who I wrote that scathing post about wasn’t someone I knew very well, and her low opinion of me (which it turned out had been low from the beginning–she just didn’t like me, which is okay, it happens to everyone) really didn’t matter too much, since we hadn’t been “friends” for very long. But in the fallout from that bad decision I made to call her out publicly, I alienated someone else whose friendship I really DID value–because it turned out that person was friends with the person I ranted about. I didn’t know.

I also did something else to anger the woman who’s friendship I valued (basically, a blatant invasion of her boundaries), but again, at the time I didn’t realize what I did would be hurtful to them. I was just so…CLUELESS. All of this impulsive borderline shit I was pulling came off to others as MALIGNANT NARCISSISM and since then I’ve had that label slapped on me by someone who mattered to me and a few who never really did. Being thought of that way by someone I value really hurts. It hurts a lot. That’s about the worst insult I could ever get (strangely enough, when I was younger, the easiest way to insult me was to call me TOO SENSITIVE, ha!)

But I deserved it too. Putting myself in my alienated friend’s shoes after the damage was done, and thinking about how I would have felt if someone did the same thing to me, I couldn’t deny that I would have been extremely angry, to say the least. Also, the timing of my actions was just too weird. I didn’t know I was hurting anyone, at least not consciously. I really didn’t. But how would my friend know I didn’t know? Why wouldn’t she think it was malicious and intentional?

The problem with having BPD is the obtuseness that comes with it. In that sense, it can resemble Aspergers because you just don’t KNOW what is appropriate. You simply are not aware of when you’re acting out, manipulating or attacking someone. I think this is one of the little-talked about things that separates BPD from full-blown narcissism. Borderlines can just be so fucking clueless. We are so out of touch with ourselves and who we really are that we don’t even have a false self to pretend to know what it’s doing. We really don’t know what the hell we’re doing and even when we think we have our behaviors under control, they still sneak out, without our even knowing. It makes you really feel crazy and out of control when later on it’s pointed out to you (as to a two year old) WHY what you said or did was wrong and WHY someone was hurt by it, when you thought it as just a normal reaction at the time and you had no earthly idea it would be so hurtful or damaging. But when you do become aware, it’s so OBVIOUS that you say to yourself, how the hell could I not SEE that?

BPD is a sort of blindness. You get so tangled up in your own emotional state you literally cannot see how you may be hurting others. You may not be throwing screaming temper tantrums or throwing things across the room, but the harmful actions come out in other, sneaky, passive-aggressive ways. You don’t WANT to hurt others, but you do anyway because YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING. It sucks because as a person who does have a conscience and struggles constantly with guilt and shame, I feel remorse when I realize what I have done. The problem is, by the time I become aware, it’s often too late to repair the lost friendship. They have already given up and moved on. BPD destroys relationships.

I feel like even with the DBT skills I’ve been using and the reparenting techniques I’ve tried recently, that there is so much about this awful disorder I don’t know. I don’t know myself as well as I should. Dammit, I DON’T TRUST MYSELF! My Aspergers/Avoidant PD mitigates my Borderline symptoms to some extent, but they still come out. I avoid others partly because I’m afraid I might hurt them. I don’t want to be this way anymore.

I feel like I need to educate myself much more about BPD, and just knowing WHY we do the things we do and act out in passive aggressive ways without knowing what we’re doing, will help. So that’s why I just ordered some new books. I need to spend some more time reading and less time unintentionally creating drama, stupidly thinking that it’s “right.”

This journey of self-discovery is amazing most of the time, but sometimes facing the truth about yourself is unbelievably painful.

One last thing–if you are reading this (and you will know who you are if you read this post), I want to say I’m so sorry. I was wrong.

Turtle.

Posted on June 1, 2015 by luckyotter

Last night I read a blog post by a woman who has BPD that described how out of control she felt. As a fellow borderline (who is not symptomatic), I could relate, and shared something I learned with her. I hope it helps.

In 1996 when I was hospitalized for major depression (and diagnosed with bipolar I with underlying BPD) I had no idea how to regulate my emotions. I had barely any more control over my emotional state than a toddler who throws temper tantrums in public. My disorder caused me to fly off the handle at the tiniest things, especially if I felt slighted. I overreacted to things that would have caused barely a ruffled feather in a normal person–but of course being married to a gaslighting narcissist made things so much harder for me. The only reason I wasn’t more out of control than I already was was due to the introversion and reticence that comes along with my Aspergers and Avoidant PD. In a sense those disorders helped keep me sane. Even when I didn’t lose control, I often felt like I was out of my body or the world felt odd and dreamlike. I learned later on these strange feelings were really a dissociative state that is common in borderlines when they feel emotionally overwhelmed. Many borderlines use illegal drugs to self-medicate, and I smoked a lot of pot in those days.

I’ve gotten a lot better since then, and found the DBT therapy I was given during my stay there immensely helpful. I still use it. Back then I still lived with my MN abusive husband and that made things difficult but I still found the DBT exercises helpful once I returned home (things are a LOT better now that we’re not together). I believe they kept me able to just get through life on a day to day basis, even if I still barely managed it.

One thing we learned in the DBT classes was a simple little thing called “turtling.” Whenever you feel like you’re going to lose your composure and “go off,” you imagine yourself as a turtle retreating back under its shell. A turtle does this instinctively when they feel threatened; for BPD patients, “going inside your shell” teaches us to be mindful and THINK before reacting, because impulsivity is something that is a problem for us. In the classes, we made ourselves little turtles out of clay. It was fun and childlike making the turtles, and we even got to paint them and fire them in a small kiln afterwards. I remember carrying my turtle with me everywhere for awhile and pulling him out whenever I felt myself about to lose my composure. My clay turtle helped me remember to be mindful. I still have mine. Recently I found my turtle in the back of a drawer and pulled him out again.

I remember there was a young woman in those classes who used to cut herself whenever she felt her emotions going out of control. The video I posted last night talked about why so many borderlines cut themselves. Cutting is a temporary way to regulate emotions that seem out of control. Instead of “going off” and possibly attacking someone else, she would cut herself. She said she felt relief whenever she did this, like the lid being taken off a pot of boiling water. But after learning how to “turtle,” she told the group she no longer felt the need to do that. Turtling is an equally tactile but a much less self-destructive way to self-regulate.

It isn’t necessary to have a physical object like a clay turtle to be mindful and think before acting, but the tactility of it can be helpful and keep me grounded in reality.
I know this little exercise sounds kind of stupid and childish, but it really does work!